On September 1st 2023 the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 1181 (HB 1181). This bill, while claiming to be intended to protect minors from accessing adult content, does no such thing in reality.
Although delayed for a while due to legal challenges the U.S. Court of Appeals allowed it to continue and it went into effect mid-March 2024.
In short, the bill puts all responsibility on site operators to confirm the age of every visitor. This is, of course, impossible without the visitor submitting proof of their identity. There is no standardized mechanism for visitors to do this.
Not only does this bill require age verification, it also mandates that patently false warnings be displayed alongside all media, proclaiming such nonsense as adult media “is proven to harm human brain development” and “weakens brain function”.
To make clear, there is absolutely zero medical evidence on which to base such ludicrous claims. These bloviations are eerily similar to claims made centuries ago about women “growing beards” and “becoming crazed” if they were permitted to ride a bicycle.
Yes, that really was considered a medical concern by some.
Readers who can recall the early days of online adult entertainment might remember systems such as AVS, or ManCheck. These could be adopted by websites as a kind of paywall. These accounts could be created by payment of $1, or even a token payment refunded. It was believed that someone who could pay using a debit or credit card was therefore automatically of legal age to be able to have an account.
One registration to such a database would allow you access to all the sites using that system. There is nothing similar to this system today, especially now that so many payment processing services are reluctant to do business with adult media companies.
Millions of Americans didn’t know about the Texas bill when it passed. It only really seemed to hit the news when PornHub – one of the world’s largest platforms for free adult entertainment – began blocking all traffic from the state of Texas and instead presented an open letter to visitors explaining why this was happening.
Since the middle of May all Texans visiting PornHub have had their excitement greatly dampened, and not in a good way.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” their statement begins. “Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.”
“We have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas,” the statement continues. “In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”
PornHub is not alone.
Aylo – the umbrella company of sites like Brazzers, RedTube and YouPorn – has taken similar action to block IP addresses in the state of Texas.
Texas is by no means the only state to enact such draconian measures. Virginia, Utah, Montana, Mississippi and Arkansas have all implemented almost identical regulatory requirements. Florida is expected to begin enforcing an even more egregious law at the start of 2025, expanded to include all social media platforms.
Sadly, even the traditionally pragmatic UK has pushed forward a similar set of laws designed at “protecting minors” while doing the opposite.
By delegitimizing existing businesses these new laws are driving the same audiences to more dangerous sources of adult entertainment, such as pirate sites stealing personal information, or random tubes and blogs operated far out of the reach of Texan or UK laws, sites where far worse content could be found.
Why porn bans won’t work.
Conservative lawmakers have clearly learned nothing from the prohibition era, but aside from the reality that banning something only makes it more tempting there are other reasons why it’s a failure from the start.
Firstly, Texas law applies only to Texans. This is not a Federal law, nor is it International law. Such a porn ban inevitably leads to businesses which do currently operate in Texas leaving the state, just as PornHub is doing in principle if not in physical practice. It will also potentially drive audiences to less reputable sources, operated under far less responsible regimes.
Secondly, a VPN immediately makes such a law entirely pointless. We’ll get to that shortly.
There is no central system, no one-stop shop allowing consumers to submit their data once to get this issue over with and allow them access to everything they could access before. There is no standardized digital passport getting you through the gates.
Nor would many want to submit to such a system; a single database containing the personal information of millions of consumers of adult entertainment would be one of the biggest targets for hackers and foreign governments you could ever possibly conceive.
Imagine the power an enemy government could exert over elected officials or business leaders after securing their data from such a system.
The public rightly doesn’t want it, but that doesn’t seem to stop Conservative politicians. Whether we’re talking about books in libraries, porn sites or a woman’s uterus, they’re apparently happy to ignore public opinion and expect you to continue to vote for them.
VPN services.
Millions of Americans use a Virtual Private Network to access websites and services they might otherwise be unable to access from their location, or to protect their data from the less ethical online entities. This is now the easiest way to get around porn bans.
VPN services are incredibly popular, primarily because it allows users to view services like Netflix from different locations, with different menus. Millions use VPN services to give the appearance of being in the UK or Australia, allowing them to watch locally published media which would otherwise be restricted for external audiences.
Google searches for VPN services in Texas have allegedly climbed four-fold since PornHub began blocking traffic from the state, according to a recent report by CNN.
For a monthly fee you can regain access to all the sites you enjoyed previously, and you can do so while giving these lawmakers the middle finger and refusing to submit to their demands. PornHub (and their peers) can continue as they have been, you can continue to be a viewer, and the Texas politicians who don’t know the difference between a VPN and an ISP are left befuddled.
A good VPN like Nord, Surfshark or Proton VPN will also protect you from other threats online, such as sites flagged for malware, or services that harvest your data for nefarious reasons. You can view the best list of vpn sites right here, which can help you make up your mind.
What is the solution?
Every sane person, porn fan or not, agrees that preventing minors from accessing harmful content online should be a priority. The disagreement is purely about whose responsibility this should be.
Rather than attempting to force the entire world to become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the responsibility should be on the parents who are giving their child the phone, tablet or desktop they are using to access this content.
There are already numerous tools parents can use to restrict access to adult media. These methods have existed for more than a decade. If parents choose not to use them, or they’re too lazy to learn how to implement them, that should not be the responsibility of every other human on Earth.
The world is never going to comply with the moralistic wishes of a political class, regardless of whether those people are based in Texas, Afghanistan, the UK, or Russia. It doesn’t matter what God you pray to, what religious institutions you attend, or what political pulpit you occupy.
The Internet allows freedom that cannot be contained by any one government, and it never will be contained by any one government regardless of how large or small that government power is.
If the responsibility should not be on the distributors, and parents refuse to take responsibility for their own offspring, is there another solution?
Indeed, it seems there is.
PornHub has suggested that device manufacturers should take the responsibility out of the hands of irresponsible parents by making age restriction hard-wired.
While details are scarce, it’s believed that under this plan devices would operate based on the age declaration of the user. If a parent buys a phone for their minor child they can simply add their age at start-up and automatic restrictions would apply. This setting would then be password protected by the parent.
While this idea still needs to be fully realized and the specifics established, it’s believed language would be the key to limiting searches, text content, url input and social media posts.
This would – in theory – be an ideal solution as it would allow adult terms to be blocked entirely, a kind of self-censoring algorithm would reject or approve sites based on their content in the same way Google establishes the content of a site to appropriately rank a result.
Another solution is to limit restrictions to visual media such as photos, videos and art. There are already tools able to identify adult media files and block them from display. Those who recall the demise of Tumblr will remember they used such a system to prevent the display of adult content for a time, before they ended their status in social media by becoming entirely Victorian in their attitudes and banning all adult content entirely.
There is no fool-proof solution to this problem and I doubt there ever will be, but shifting the responsibility from parents to media companies is certainly not an adequate way to achieve what so many people claim to want to achieve.
Unless, of course, the intent is not to safeguard minors at all, and it’s purely a political move to placate lobbying groups and garner votes from uninformed citizens.
Would you be willing to hand over your ID to be stored in a database for this purpose? Should the responsibility be on parents, site owners, or both? Is an end-user option by Apple or Samsung workable? Let me know in the comments.